


The Eternal Return

by jerseydevious



Series: Earth-JD [1]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: (pre-crisis that no one asked for), Gen, background information no one asked for, births and graduations no one asked for, the joe chill of good writing declared me an enemy of the state and murdered me at quiznos, this entire fic is a thing that no one asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 08:38:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jerseydevious/pseuds/jerseydevious
Summary: The Dynamic Duo, through all the new beginnings.





	The Eternal Return

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so, this sort of kicks off my little pet project, which is my own little Jerseyverse of Batman fanfiction, which I created because I am a control freak and want to control all possible variables of everything, ever. And also because I really like Batman, maybe. And yes, I did just stick my name in front of it and call it a name. If Batman can do it, so can I.
> 
> I considered a few different fics to kick it off, but really, I wanted to start with this one; for one thing, this whole universe folds out of Batman and Robin, and all subsequent Batmans and Robins fold out of the very first two. For another thing, I wanted to set the status quo of my tiny, self-indulgent ficverse, that status quo being Sometimes Pre-Crisis Was Better. With Dick's graduation, especially, I think Pre-Crisis does it better. So here, have a dopey little thing about the Dynamic Duo, that establishes a couple things, and is mostly an excuse for flowers and babies.

Of all of the places for a Wayne to be born, a battered stone alleyway was not thought to be one of them.

 

Gotham General was funded by Patrick Morgan Wayne and built in 1947, a towering structure with two great wings that fanned out on either side, as if the building itself reached forward to welcome the sick and injured to its gate. The hospital was state-of-the-art and considered by most to even be beautiful; the act of building it was considered such a great act of charity the city offered to give Patrick Morgan a statue in his honor. Patrick Morgan refused the statue. As far as he was concerned, being able to loudly boast about his gift to the city whenever a Kane was within hearing range was all the reward he needed.

 

(A month after the hospital was complete, the Kanes bankrolled much-needed renovations to Arkham Asylum. Elizabeth Arkham, who preferred to be called Betsy, would meet Roderick Kane during the process of planning how to turn Arkham’s black spires into the wings of angels, and Martha Kane would be born just a few short years later. But the new Arkham Asylum would die stillborn, and would stand with weathered, mossy stone and creaking gates, on its dismal island, alone against the cresting waves of the sea, forever mercy’s miscarried baby.)

 

Gotham General, however successful, was not immune to the common cold of infrastructure: traffic. On February 18th, 1963, such was the case; several cars on the highway had conspired together to make Martha Wayne’s life difficult, and with mischievous grins had careened into each other, holding up gleaming rows of cars for hours.

 

Now, Alfred Pennyworth was a resourceful man. A man wasn’t a valet if he wasn’t resourceful. He had survived bloody war and cutthroat spying all though incredible wit and a good deal of luck. So he drove in a big loop around the city, attempting to skirt around the crash and the throbbing steel engines that clustered about it, while Martha sat in the backseat and panted and stroked her straining belly as if it would placate the child it carried. To this point, her pregnancy had been relatively easy; her feet were constantly swollen, and her back ached like no one’s business, because she was five foot nothing and she’d ballooned out something like a whale. But her husband was a doctor, and good with his hands. She had an insatiable craving for chocolate, but that was none too big a hardship. Her baby rarely kicked, and when he did, he was grudging, as if he were filling some fetal requirement and would rather be doing just about anything else. Martha figured that she’d had it made this far, and had built up a store of bad luck, which rained down on her now like the wailing horns in the streets. So she rode out her contractions one by one as Alfred drove frantically, scowling. In fact, she was scowling so hard she must have made an impression on her dear baby, who would wear that same scowl as his resting facial expression for the bulk of his life.

 

Her baby, who would be named either Bertram or Hortensia depending on the gender, was an efficient little one. He decided he was ready to enter the world as soon as he could, to get this whole mess over with so he could get to the finer things in life, like milk and blankets and learning how to pull on hair with all his tiny might. After three hours of waiting and driving, Martha brought her fist down rapidly against the back of the passenger’s seat, and screamed, “Get me _out!”_

 

Alfred did. They pulled over and Alfred pulled her out as gently as he could, and offered a sneer at the grimy alleyway they had stopped beside, which quickly morphed into panic as he realized a few facts; firstly, he had never in his life delivered a baby. Secondly, he had never in his life delivered a baby. Thirdly, well. There was probably something wrong with the situation that could slot neatly into the third column, but Alfred didn’t know what it was, because he had never in his life delivered a baby. There just weren’t a lot of babies to be delivered in war. He’d glued plenty of men together and sent them marching back to the frontlines, but he had never had to reach into a woman’s cervix and haul a baby into the world.

 

Tanya Fox had chosen that night to march home with a bag of oranges for the neighbor two doors down. She was the only member of her family that could walk to the corner store in the dead of night, because she had an expression that would make the most hardened criminal wonder if he’d taken the clothes off the line like his ma had asked him. Tanya Fox had been an unofficial midwife for her building since she’d moved in; she’d delivered her younger sister at age fourteen, and by the time she was eighteen she had delivered two more. Unlike Alfred, she had delivered a great many babies, would deliver a great many babies, and when she came upon the hopeless scene of Martha screaming in pain and Alfred looking on with an expression of sorrow altogether too dramatic for the situation, she dropped the oranges, rolled up her sleeves, and started barking orders. This, too, must have made an impression on the dear baby, because it was what he’d spend a great amount of his time doing when he was much older and his scowl was firmly perfected.

 

The son of Martha and Thomas Wayne was born three minutes past midnight on February 19th, 1963, and when he was born he cried half-heartedly as if he were already bored of the notion and only wanted to show them his lungs were nice and fine, thank you. The four of them sat in the car, gathered around the fancy heater all the new GM cars had started to carry, when Martha looked down at her baby and sighed, “Thomas wanted us to name the boy Bertram.”

 

Tanya looked at the baby. The baby turned his puffy face to her and communicated a desperate plea. She resisted; it was a father’s right to name his boy whatever he wanted. The baby’s lip began to wobble. _Think of what I’ll do to your headache if I start screaming in this tin can,_ his blue eyes seemed to say.

 

Tanya quirked a frown. “I don’t think he has the face for it.”

 

Martha looked at her curiously. “What does he have the face for, then?”

 

Tanya leaned back, her seat crinkling beneath her. She feigned being deep in thought, and glanced around; in truth, he just didn’t look like anything. He looked like a pale pink smudge in the darkness of the night, with peach fuzz for hair and eyes so light they almost made the memory of a midsummer sky feel less blue. But for the second time that night, luck came through; Tanya’s eyes lighted upon the street sign. _Bruce Avenue._

 

“Bruce,” she said. “He looks like a young little Bruce.”

 

Martha’s lips made the shape of the word, tasting it. She looked down at the baby, who seemed much more pleased with this option, and then back at Tanya. “What a perfect name,” she breathed, stroking a finger over Bruce’s cheek. “My Bruce.”

 

Tanya shifted so Martha wouldn’t see the street sign in the window. Alfred was laughing discreetly into his hand. Baby Bruce offered a tiny sigh, and wriggled closer to Martha’s warmth, and Martha squealed. “Perfect. Just perfect.”

 

“What will you say to Mister Wayne?” Alfred asked.

  
“Oh, he’ll deal with it,” Martha said.

 

They brought Martha and Bruce to the hospital, and both mother and son received a clean bill of health. Thomas cried over his son so loud and hard he woke Bruce up, but Bruce seemed completely content to stare balefully up at his teary-eyed father in complete silence. This made Thomas cry more, because he’d, “never known a lad so quiet and patient at two hours old.” Thomas insisted repeatedly that he had a miracle baby in his arms, and while Martha held her son once more and preened her motherly feathers over making such a beautiful baby, Thomas ran about the hospital telling every living thing with an ear about how his son had been born on a sidewalk and was just the most pleasant little boy in the world.

 

Alfred did eventually hold the baby, and he held Bruce to his chest stiffly, brows drawn together and his mouth scoring a dark frown on his face. He would seem displeased with Bruce’s initiative to be born on concrete in the dead of winter if it weren’t for the tears in his eyes, which he blinked away furiously. His frown and stiff back and tears painted a strange image; he was the very picture of emotional confusion. Bruce was enamored instantly, and beamed up at Alfred with his gummy mouth wide, burbling out his first attempts at a laugh. It was clear that Bruce had chosen Alfred as his favorite, because whenever he was within a foot of the man, he started making bubbly baby noises, even after Alfred told him flatly to stop.

 

Tanya stayed by Martha’s side. She preferred to avoid the looks directed her way, because her black skin seemed to stand out even brighter in the whiteness of the hospital. That night, she struck up a friendship with the four of them, and by the next month, Thomas would hire her husband—Lucius Fox—to work for him. Such was the great wheel of kindness; one gave birth to another.

 

Of all the places for a Wayne to be born, the battered stone of an alleyway was not thought to be one of them. But Batman was born to Gotham’s brick and stone and rot and ruin, because the great wheel of kindness turned faithfully forward.

 

-

 

In midsummer, Wayne Manor was lit by long yellow sunlight; the trees that crowded the borders of the grounds grew thick with plush green leaves, that swayed and ruffled and were sweet to taste on the wind. Wildflowers of all kinds turned their heads towards the beaming sun and rose, effortlessly, for the sky. The deer came at sunup and sundown, gamboling about on whippet-thin legs and thick ball joints. The days were so hot even the thrushes and the finches and the robins seemed to fly slower. Their songs grew more lazy, seemingly taking on a bit of a sleepy drawl even in the crisp mornings.

 

The Manor itself was nestled at the end of a long, curling cobblestone path; it had never been replaced, so the stones were smooth and crooked. Cars picked their way slowly through it or not at all. Rolling hills crowned by hulking ancient trees surrounded the mansion, and next to these gargantuan neighbors the estate looked downright small; a collection of spires, shining glass, nothing more. The house itself was dark and underwhelming. It was an old collection of slatted roof tiles and expertly cut topiaries, and not much more than that.

 

The Waynes were active people, fond of having company over. They talked and laughed with golden grins; gallant, gracious. Bruce was different. Bruce did not like people very much. He liked the trees, and the wind, and the flowers, and the deer, and the birds, but he did not like the people. There was a big willow at the foot of a sad little grass-carpeted hill, with long switches that dipped into the thin creek that wound by it, and beneath it Bruce would hide. While his father was at the hospital and his mother talked with an endless amount of people in a sharp, business-like voice, Bruce would huddle beneath the waiting wings of the willow and watch the ants march up and down the trunk of the tree. Sometimes he would sit among the wildflowers and smell them, and this he could do all day.

 

Today, Martha was not allowing it. So Alfred swung off his jacket and stalked through the high grass to the willow. He ducked through the long feathers of the tree, looking down at Bruce, who was happily watching the stillness of a spider that had slowly begun to realize the pale face watching him intended no harm.

 

Alfred perched his hands on his hips. “Master Bruce.”

 

Bruce turned round, chubby cheeks up to him, expression somehow questioning.

 

“Miss Wayne has need of you, sir,” Alfred said.

 

Bruce blinked with doleful eyes. “Why,” he said.

 

“Mr. Rolsh has children she’d like you to meet,” Alfred said. There were four of those little demons. Perhaps he wasn’t entirely fair. Alfred supposed they were only demons insofar as they were unlike Bruce; Bruce preferred to keep quiet and to himself, and the Rolsh children were loud and wild and liked to play rough. Quite frankly, Alfred thought they were horrible, and worried about Bruce being left with them. The boy was so soft he was liable to fall apart under such rough treatment.

 

Bruce sighed, and took a moment of silence to pout over the lost time watching the little spider. He pushed himself off the ground, not bothering to dust off his clothes, and said seriously, “Fine.”

 

“Really, it’ll do you some good, sir,” Alfred said. He held the sweep of switches back for Bruce to duck through, and Bruce did so imperiously, nearly pompously, as if he were the little king of his tiny patch of heaven.

 

Alfred marched back through the grass. “The Rolsh family has connections that your mother… _requires_ for her work. It would be best to make a good impression. I’ll fetch you a change of clothing, so you’re properly dressed—Master Bruce?”

 

Bruce, who was ten feet away, held up his hand as a traffic officer asking Alfred to stop would do. Alfred snorted at the boy’s bossiness, but stopped anyway. The dark head went bobbing through the grass, and then through the clutch of bright wildflowers that grew so easily on the untamed quarters of the estate. Bruce considered each flower carefully, scientifically, and then came trotting back.

 

He presented a dandelion to Alfred without ceremony. “It’s the best one,” he insisted.

 

Alfred took the flower, smiling at it kindly. “I will add it to the collection, my dear boy.”

 

Alfred patted his head. Bruce’s eyes closed, and his face scrunched in that deeply pleased fashion which meant he treasured this current moment above all else, the sort of face a cat makes when his chin is rubbed. It was true that Bruce often liked to bring people things, for reasons unknown; Alfred had amassed quite the collection of dried flowers, strange rocks, and even a snakeskin.

 

Bruce followed him into the house, and dutifully changed into something less rumpled. He stuck close to Alfred’s side, however, when they approached the patio where Martha and Mr. Rolsh were speaking.

 

Martha turned from Rolsh at the sound of the door, beaming. “Bruce! There you are, at last. I was starting to think you’d just run off.”

Bruce shrugged. Martha ruffled his hair, her bracelets tinkling as she did so, and he made that pleased, kitten-like expression again. Mr. Rolsh stuck out his hand, which Bruce shook after a beat too long, and mumbled out a noncommittal noise when Mr. Rolsh asked him how he’d been.

 

Martha frowned. Frowns were not pleasant to see on Martha’s face; she had a heart-shaped face, an owl’s face, framed by short, curly, dark hair. She looked like she was born to smile. “He’s not much of a talker,” she said.

 

“Oh, so he’s a shy one,” Mr. Rolsh said, laughing so the skin of his red cheeks rumpled up. “He’ll have to grow out of that, won’t he? Christ, he looks like Tom. Think he’s got any of the football ability? Back in the day, Tom was one hell of a linebacker. Hey, y’know what?”

 

Mr. Rolsh whistled, long and loud. His children came scampering from the corners of the garden, each having mussed ginger hair and bruises that promised childish competition. “Kids, this is Bruce Wayne.”

 

Bruce waved. The Rolsh children chittered amongst themselves. Bruce’s hand rapidly went down, and was jammed back into his pocket.

 

“Run along, now,” Mr. Rolsh said. The children bounded off, and Bruce made an attempt to wander away into the flowers, but Martha interrupted with a suggestion that he should get to know the other boys. After all, they’d be going to school together come the fall, as every eight-year-old packed up and marched blearily into the third grade. Might as well start now, she insisted.

 

The look on Bruce’s face was one of such pure misery that Martha sent Alfred to watch over them out of pity. Somewhere along the years, Alfred had become less of a valet, and more of a babysitter; Bruce had taken an unprecedented liking to him, enough so that Thomas often joked they were putting Bruce in his custody if anything ever happened to them. It used to irritate Alfred. Now, he put his irritation on the shelf where he kept the rocks and flowers and the one dry snakeskin.

 

Watching the boys wheel and buck about was a relatively easy task. Bruce, for the most part, stood to the side. When the boys began to race each other, Alfred watched Bruce lose each race by a painfully wide margin, and winced when the Rolshes picked on him. Eventually, Bruce’s abysmal performance lost the value of mockery, and the boys returned to tearing out handfuls of grass and throwing it at each other.

 

Bruce slunk away and sat on the ground by Alfred. “I don’t like them,” he said, quietly, rubbing at the fabric of his pants in little circles.

 

“You’re just the odd one out, Master Bruce,” Alfred said. He attempted something at a reassuring tone. “Your father is quite the athlete. Chances are you’ll run circles around them, someday. You just have a bit of growing to do.”

 

Bruce fiddled with a blade of grass. “No. They would’ve picked on whoever lost, I could tell. That’s what everyone does. No one likes a loser. So I lost for them. But they tear things up.”

 

Alfred raised a brow.

 

Bruce sighed. “They _do._ The flowers. They kept tearing up the flowers. From the roots. They can’t grow back if you tear out the roots. Why do they do that?”

 

“Some people,” Alfred said, “like to kill beautiful things.”

 

-

 

“If you would _hold still,”_ Alfred hissed.

 

Bruce made a childish mewling noise, a thing of petulant defiance rather than pain. If Bruce had been in pain, Alfred would never have known it. He sighed, tacking the adhesive edge of the bandage over Bruce’s skin. It wasn’t straight. Alfred did his best to ignore it. “Fine. You’re free to go.”

 

Bruce pulled back his bandaged hand, glaring at Alfred as if Alfred had been the one to slice his hand open in the first place. “Try not to pick at it. Or punch a mirror with it.”

 

Bruce, who was already picking at it with slender fingers, glared. “It was _fine.”_

 

“Whatever you say, Master Bruce.”

 

Bruce hopped off of the counter. He shook his shaggy hair, and stretched—at eighteen, he was lean and gangly and stretched taut as a bowstring. He had the makings of a boy who’d become every bit Thomas Wayne’s broad-shouldered shadow, like a knobbly-kneed puppy who promised to grow into a Great Dane someday. His hands were large and awkward and square, limbs too long, joints bony and sharp but still thick and round, like the dust-worn horns of a bull. It was apparent in his face, too, beneath the trace of baby fat and the flop of hair: Thomas’s nose, Thomas’s brow, Thomas’s lips, Thomas’s jaw. The eyes, though. The eyes were beasts all their own. Pale and smooth as river rocks; the closest color anyone could attribute to them was blue, and even then they were a color too pale for blue. Alfred had no idea where Bruce had gotten those eyes. It seemed altogether too likely that Bruce had just decided to invent his own damn color and toss a spanner in the works of genetics.

 

“Sit back down,” Alfred snapped, pulling out a chair at the table. He forged his voice into something cold and thin. “You will eat if I have to intubate you myself.”

 

Bruce offered an exaggerated moan, and flopped in the seat, back slouched against the chair in the specific fashion that annoyed Alfred the most.

 

“Have some respect, Master Bruce,” Alfred warned.

 

Bruce didn’t sit up. He scowled harder. Alfred suspected that, in the moment he’d turned back to the soup, Bruce had slumped further in the chair. It was a disobedience bred by the fact that there was no punishment possible; there was nothing Bruce enjoyed enough to mourn its loss.

 

They ate in silence. Bruce squished the potatoes in his stew absently, and Alfred ate primly until he was satisfied and nothing more. The little table they’d moved in the kitchen stayed still and blue with silence. After, Alfred folded his napkin, cleared his throat, and asked, “How has your schooling been, Master Bruce?”

 

Bruce’s eyes slid up slowly. His attention rested between a carrot speared on his fork, and Alfred himself. “It’s been fine.”

 

“Any friends?”

 

“No,” Bruce said. His voice was much softer than his countenance. It was soft and somewhat breathless, and would have been impossible to hear over a television set or a radio. Bruce spoke like he wasn’t particularly interested in doing so, and wasn’t particularly interested in being heard.

 

“Allow me to rephrase,” Alfred said, with a tight smile. “Have you _tried_ to make friends?”

 

“Not very interested.”

 

Alfred closed his eyes. “Not very interested,” he repeated, leaning back. “Alright.”

 

Bruce’s fork dropped back into his bowl. He hadn’t eaten the carrot. “Oh, Al, don’t look at me like that.”

 

“Like what,” Alfred said, taking the bowl.

 

“Disappointed.”

 

“Do I look disappointed?”

 

“Yes,” Bruce huffed, settling back in his chair. “You’re always disappointed. I think everyone’s disappointed. You know they talk about the baby Arkham, right. They’re disappointed that I haven’t killed you and buried you beneath the floorboards yet—”

 

“Master Bruce,” Alfred cut in, sharply. “I can speak with the school if you wish.”

 

“Don’t,” Bruce said, quickly. “I was just saying. Everyone’s so damn disappointed all the time.”

 

“I am not, nor have I ever been, disappointed in you,” Alfred said.

 

Bruce snorted. “Now that’s a lie if I’ve ever heard one.”

 

“I hadn’t realized my very own feelings were lies.”

 

Bruce gave him a heated, glowering look. “Remember when I flipped the Stratos?”

 

Alfred set the bowls back down on the table, resigned at last to the conversation. He made a production of crossing his arms, shifting into a comfortable stance. “How could I forget.”

 

“You didn’t like me much after that,” Bruce said. The room fell silent. It was the truth. Alfred had torn Bruce a new one for it; and then another one as they got to the car, and then another one as they got to the Manor, and then another one every time he saw Bruce a whole month afterwards.

 

Bruce’s eyes fell back to the table. Whatever little animation he had acquired during the conversation seemed to leak out of him, and Alfred felt his heart twist for this boy he’d raised, this boy he’d tried to fix with love alone. Love was not concrete. Love, when poured into the cracks of the heart, would not bind that heart together; love was merely love, and love was not enough.

 

“I won’t be back for a while,” Bruce said, quietly. “A long while.”

 

“College, of course. I understand.”

 

Bruce shook his head. “I dropped out.”

 

“Excuse me. I have bad hearing, at my age. You did what?”

 

“Listen, Al, you can’t—”

 

“Explain to me,” Alfred said, acidly, “what I can’t do when you’ve just decided to throw your life away. Explain to me precisely what it is that I am _not_ to do when you have abandoned your schooling, wasted your potential, ignored your every talent—”

 

“Listen to me!” Bruce roared. Alfred was shocked silent momentarily, since it was rare that Bruce raised his voice above what most considered to be a murmur. Even when he was rageful and destructive he was dead silent, and by God, the boy cried so quiet it was a wonder he breathed during the endeavor at all. Alfred feared for him. His boy was still so young in so many ways; kind, and vulnerable, painfully naïve, all of the things the world liked to cut its teeth on. Somehow these qualities had survived the loss of his parents, somehow these special things had found ways to hold on, and with a white-knuckled grip Alfred had held back, but Bruce had declared himself grown so very _young_. He’d gone off to boarding school at twelve, overseas at fourteen. Every summer he came back taller. Every summer he came back angrier. Every summer he carried something new with him over the water; some skill, some piece of knowledge, some experience he shouldn’t have. It was hard to protect a boy who refused it. It was hard to hold on to a sapling that kept growing.

 

“I’m listening,” Alfred said, thickly.

 

Bruce had jumped to his feet, overtaken with the need to say his piece. Beneath Alfred’s attention, he seemed to wither, shoulders bunching up, the fist that had slammed into the table uncurling slightly. Bruce stared at his bandaged hand. “Al. There’s something I need to do.”

 

“Is it more important than your life?” Alfred asked.

 

Bruce looked him in the eye then, those pale river rocks staring back at him with a breed of spine Alfred hadn’t yet seen. “Yes,” Bruce said, and it was the truth.

 

“You want this,” Alfred said, softly. If only he could have loved this boy enough; if only love could mend the broken and save the damned, maybe the world would be a less crooked place. If only, if only. Alfred thought sometimes it was the saddest phrase in the English language. “I thought you wanted to go through medical school. Be a doctor, like your father.”

 

“Not that kind of doctor,” Bruce said. “Something new. Something no one’s ever seen before.”

 

“What on Earth are you planning?”  
  
For the first time in many cold and dark years, Bruce’s smile spread clear to his eyes. “Something crazy.”

 

-

 

The day Mary Grayson found out she was pregnant, she performed a triple flip for the first time. Afterwards, she had to scamper down the ladder as fast as a squirrel, and throw up quickly behind a stationary horse. The horse tossed his handsome head, flicking the tall plume of feathers stapled to his bridle, and gave Mary a look that said, _really?_ She had felt unusually judged.

 

C.C. Haly and Norton Bros. Circus was unique among the nouveau circuses in that it included horses, and held quite a few prized acts on the backs of them. The Lipizzaners, each of them snow white and of stellar conformation, were shipped from a stud in Austria and trained by Ines, who seemed to be their perfect opposite. The stallions moved with fluid grace and were gifted with regal beauty, and Ines was a short, stout, dark woman that was rarely pleased. Ines ran her horses hard but smart, and had a gift for making the handlers blunder into their own stupidity while she sat back on her haunches with a raised brow. After the expense of the Lipizzaners, there was only money left for a handler to two horses, so only four of the team of eight could perform at a time. Tonight, Mary found herself on her hands and knees beside Caballo and Marty, who rubbed the leather of the long rein in his hand nervously.

 

“Mrs. Grayson?” he asked. “Ah, Mary?”

Caballo whinnied and rocked on his hooves. Caballo, of all the Lipizzaners, was the most attuned to those around him, and therefore the most easily spooked. At one performance, an airhorn had sent Caballo careening through the crowd, screaming and kicking up his heels; Marty, who was himself gentle and sensitive, spent an hour leading him back to the campsite. Haly had been waiting with his shotgun, mad enough to shoot the damn thing, but Marty had thrown himself in front of Caballo and refused to move. Eventually, Haly had turned away, muttering something unpleasant about bills and customers. Mary, who had thought Marty was something of a pushover, had taken a new shining to him. But her affection was limited to the amount of customers that came crawling back after Caballo ran them off, and that was barely a handful.

 

“Are you alright?”

 

“Yes,” Mary said by instinct. Her stomach twisted, and she reconsidered. “No. Tell Haly they’ll have to put on John solo.”

 

Marty nodded, and called out to one of the hands. She pushed herself to her feet and stumbled out of the tent. The midway was deserted during the show, the menagerie sitting back and counting thin stacks of cash and joking about how they ought to be working for the Flower Circus instead.

 

Benny twirled one of his swords, and flipped up his fake eyepatch. “Mary? That you? What’re y’doing? The show’s on!”  
  
Mary’s lip curled. “Looks like I’m puking my guts out, Benny.”

 

Benny raised an eyebrow. “Looks like I’m callin’ the doc, then.”

 

“I just need some rest.”

 

“And that’s exactly what the doc’s gonna tell you when he gets here,” Benny said, lumbering out of his booth.

 

Mary didn’t wait for the doctor. She pulled off her blue-and-gold sequinned suit and pulled on high-waisted jeans and a shirt, and rode the cab into town. She didn’t look the cashier in the eye as she checked out, and she didn’t pay much attention to the cab, either, though he gave her a raised brow.

 

Pregnancy tests were difficult. They were a bit like a science project, and Mary had failed out of high school, so there was even more of the process to grapple with; she felt like a mad scientist, like Victor creating the monster. First she pissed into a long, rectangle glass, and then she squeezed chemicals from the dropper into both it and the other tubes of still more chemicals, and then she sat back and watched the tab. Alternately, the clock. She thought about a lot of things. She thought about that warm, bubbly feeling crawling into her throat, and then she thought about the empty seats in the audience. She thought about the places of her costume that were worn thin where it hadn’t been replaced for so many years, how the only shows that turned over profit anymore were the ones where she and John performed without a net. It took two hours of this thinking for the test to give her the results, and another hour for John to find her crying softly into her hands. It only took about a minute for John to see the test was positive and to break down into tears himself. It was a peculiar breed of happy sadness; happy for the life they were about to bring into the world, and ineffably sad for the life they would never be able to give him.

 

The circus spent her pregnancy chugging through the north. Halfway through her third month, when her baby was just a smooth, small bump, she’d been directing John’s performance when she slipped and fell, flopping stomach-first against the ground; the doctor had said she was fine, but Mary kept her hands protectively cradled around her bump as it stretched ever outward. As long as she held on, she couldn’t lose him. Her baby liked to kick a lot, too, liked to wriggle about and lay on her organs in the most difficult way possible. He got his foot stuck in her ribs a number of times, as if he were trying to remind her he was there and craved attention, and she had to push his little foot back down where it belonged in order to breathe. In her third trimester, almost to her due date, she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, and spent weeks lying on her side, facing the window lit with the white and blue of the snow.

 

Always she could see the birds outside. They were her constant comfort; where John had to leave and practice his flight, the birds would wheel and turn just outside her traincar. She grew to respect the birds who were too stubborn to fly South for winter. Cardinals, she thought, were pretty little gouts of blood, but it was the robins she favored best. The robins had slim legs and heads, and a unique locomotion. For birds, they preferred to run; they would trot on the ground for a few paces, stop, look around, and then trot back off. Rinse, repeat. They flew less than the bulbous little cardinals, and when they did fly it was in a graceless flurry of wings.

But it was their song that captured her attention. They sang in groups of high, precious tweets, and their singing was constant and amplified by the numbers of their flock. She’d read somewhere that birds were indicator species. When bird populations started to drop, it was the first sign something was going wrong in an ecosystem, because birds were sensitive to change and seemed to bear it on their wings same as the wind bore them. It seemed to Mary that as long as the robins were singing, it would all turn out for the best. Their song was the only sound she heard for hours every day, and so she clung to it as she clung to her baby.

 

Richard Grayson was born on March 21st, 1979, and he cried with all the fury of a hurricane. He wouldn’t stop crying for anything until he was pressed against Mary’s chest, and even then he sniffled furiously as if he were offended she would do something so mean to him as to put him through the terror of birth, but eventually he fell silent and asleep with a pleased sigh. He woke up ten minutes later to give a raucous series of giggles that jiggled his chubby body, as if he were trying to apologize for all of that screaming he did earlier, and then he rolled back into sleep and didn't wake up for the next twelve hours.

 

Mary loved him so much she cried for an hour, and then fell asleep clutching him in a grip so strong John found he couldn’t pluck his son from it without waking Richard, and had to watch pensively from his chair and wait his turn. He spent most of this time crying softly and stroking the soft fuzz over his hair, and whenever Richard made a mewling noise John gasped and his heart stuttered in his chest. He had spent months with the idea that his son wasn’t going to make it, fearing his wife wouldn’t make it either, and now to have this glowing, sleepy child with him, with his glowing, sleepy wife, was the greatest feeling he had ever known.

 

Eventually Richard would turn into quite the curious baby, with the biggest, roundest, bluest eyes the world had ever had the grace to see; and they called him Dick, because he had a habit of sleuthing out the candy Uncle Benny had something of an addiction to. As Dick got older and stronger and more clever, his acrobatic talent flickered up and to the surface, like a beak pushing its way through an egg. Haly started including him in their acts. A child acrobat that daring and talented drew crowds. The circus started turning a profit. They bought new costumes, with the brilliant red breasts of robins, as Mary had insisted upon; because as long as the robins were singing, there was hope ahead.

 

The wheel turned faithfully forward. Robin was born to the first of spring, and trailing on the ends of his feathers was change.

 

-

 

“This is boring,” Dick said. His tone was of the kind that made certain that everyone listening knew that his words were absolute fact, even if they were kind of muffled from where Dick had his head propped up on one flat palm. He was stretched out on the grass like a cat, staring at a spiral bloom like it had personally offended him.

 

Today they were in the gardens, which were heavy with greenery and big bursts of flowers. They were angled just so they could see the old blue willow swaying in the distance, alone at the base of its hill with the tall grass and the wildflowers. The gardens here were at the back of the Manor and only relatively tame, because neither of the plants’ caretakers had any particular desire to see them forced to grow in cruel, sharp shapes; here the plants grew as they please, merely shepherded by the gardeners.

 

“Get up, you’ll get dirt all over your clothes,” Bruce said, without any real heat. He scooped a nascent dandelion bundle out of the ground, gently, and dropped it in his bag.

 

Dick blew on the delicate petals in front of him; the rose bounced a bit, and then Dick tried it again. An impish smile began to creep up the corners of his lips.

 

Bruce swiped at a bead of sweat on his neck. “Keep from that. I’ve heard the stalks on this breed are weak.”

Dick’s eyebrows came together sharply, and his blue eyes sparked with something familiar, and then in a moment he was clutching the fat bloom in his hands, the stalk swaying with the force of its sudden departure. Without its stem, the rose seemed a little less bright.

 

Bruce frowned. “Why did you do that.”

 

“Because you’re making me angry!” Dick snapped. “I don’t want to be out here with you! I don’t—I don’t want to go to your stupid private school, I don’t want to live in your stupid house, and I don’t care about your _stupid_ flowers.”

 

Dick’s voice trailed off to a mumble, and he tossed the rose with a lazy flick of the wrist. The bloom landed in the thick, green grass, cupped by the leaves and the hot wind that blew around them. Bruce got to his knees, and then plucked it up, staring into the soft folds of the flower as if he were discerning the future from a cup of tea.

 

“This is an Abraham Darby rose,” Bruce said. “It’s a shrub rose.”

 

“I said _I don’t care!”_ Dick shouted. The force of his emotion had sent him flying to his feet, kicking up clods of dirt. “I don’t care how much of a girl you secretly are. It’s all useless. I _hate_ it.”

 

“Come here,” Bruce said.

 

The familiar look in Dick’s eyes lusted for blood, and was unsatisfied when Bruce simply held on to his flower and answered in the same deep, even voice. The familiar look in Dick’s eyes wanted snarling teeth and skin stuck under sharp nails, the red and dripping ends of torn out hair and the panting moment of exhausted glory after successfully mindless destruction. But Bruce just held his flower. He even closed his eyes and took a deep breath of it, that lovely fruity smell, and let it out, and looked for all the world that he would be perfectly happy here with his rose and nothing else.

 

Eventually Dick slid forward, and sat back on his heels. His hair was thick and curly and closed over the tips of his ears, and Bruce figured it was about time he wrestled Dick into a barbershop. He’d have to make an appointment soon.

 

“Smell it,” Bruce said, passing the flower to Dick.

 

“Why,” Dick said, harshly. “It’s just a dumb flower.”

 

“No,” Bruce said. “It’s a piece of engineering. Everything about a flower is perfectly suited to its environment. It smells like that to attract pollinators.”

 

“But if it’s supposed to be so perfect, why’d you say that thing about the stems.”

 

“This particular kind of flower was made by people,” Bruce said. “And try as we might, we don’t know better than nature does. But nature’ll fix our mistakes, if you give it time.”

 

Dick blinked down at his flower, shoulders a taut, drawn line, but he didn’t say anything. Bruce continued.

 

“I cut back the stalks when they first started growing, because they were weak,” Bruce said, flicking his hand to the shrub. “If I didn’t, the flowers would be too big for the stalks. If I hadn’t cut them back, they would droop.”

 

Dick huffed. His brows were once again pulled tight together, and now his shoulders mimicked the movement, and he held the rose as if it were the only thing holding him together.

 

“Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards,” Bruce said, nudging the flower closer to Dick’s button nose. “Go on, try it. Tell me what it smells like.”

 

Dick closed his eyes, and sucked in a deep breath. “It’s—fruity. Like peaches. But also oranges at the same time.”

 

“It’s beautiful,” Bruce said. Here he put his hands over Dick’s, and leaned forward. “But it took time, Dick. They had their bad days, too.”

 

Dick bowed his head. “I don’t like being—I don’t like being so mad all the time. I get real mean, and I don’t—I don’t like it. I don’t wanna be mean, honest, I don’t wanna be bad—”

 

Bruce’s heart twisted. Dick looked up at him, and a new look, equally familiar, was flickering there; something sad, and something terribly, horribly lost. Bruce’s hand moved to Dick’s shoulder, and he said, in a voice that brokered no argument, “You aren’t bad. And you aren’t mean.”

 

“But,” Dick said, hopelessly. His tears were lit by golden sunlight. “When I’m mad, I am! I yelled at Alfred, an’ I wouldn’t go to school, an’ a week ago I broke that vase—”

 

“That’s one yell,” Bruce said, speaking over him, “and one day of school, and one vase. You don’t yell at everyone you meet, and you go to school most of the time, and you don’t break every vase you see.”

 

Dick looked back down to the rose, and replied in a small voice, “I don’t.”

 

“Remember when you helped me cook to surprise Alfred? You didn’t have to do that, but you did. And that was good.”

 

“Yeah,” Dick whispered again. He raised his head, and eyes lighting up. “You’re—you’re right! That was good, and then I helped Suzie pick up her pencils in the hallway, and—you’re right!”

 

Bruce chuckled. “I’m not often wrong.”

 

“Don’t brag,” Dick said, almost as if it were a reflex. “And then there was when I—when I took down Zucco.”

 

Bruce looked away. He remembered the incident through a concave lens, as he did with every memory colored by fear; he’d had Dick for a month when he’d found the boy missing, when he’d had to run after him, cape flaring out behind him. Finding Dick in his old circus costume with his boot against Zucco’s neck had been a mercy.

 

“Yes.”

 

“I’m tired of being mad all the time,” Dick repeated. “I want to—I want to do something. Like you. Something good. Something new.”

 

“Something no one’s ever seen before,” Bruce echoed.

 

“Something crazy,” Dick said, and looked at him. The look in his eyes, this time, was familiar, but only familiar when set in a much older face. It was steel determination. “I want to go out with you.”

 

“And what would you be?”

“Good,” Dick said. “I’d be good. I’d be… I’d be Robin. Call me Robin.”

 

-

 

“It’ll be a slow night,” Bruce said. “City’s half asleep. I wouldn’t stay up, if I were you.”

 

Alfred snorted. “Yes, of course. I do rest easier knowing the city is protected by a giant bat.”

 

Bruce gave him a wan smile. “Bat _man,_ Al. How long did Dick say he was staying?”

“The full night, sir.”

 

“The full night?” Bruce asked. His mouth quirked a frown. “He said he’d be back in the morning, right?”

“Of course, sir.”

 

Bruce nodded. He didn’t quite trust himself to speak, because a hard knot of emotion formed in his throat whenever he thought about Dick leaving for Hudson University; since Dick had gotten his acceptance letter, Bruce had lived under a roiling cloud of equal pride and dread. Tonight, Dick was having a last celebration with other ‘97 graduates. It would be Bruce’s preparation for the rest of his life, but it was the one thing Bruce found himself unwilling to prepare for; he had grown so used to the hopeful sound of Dick’s laughter that he had no idea what whether he’d remember what the light looked like without it. If Bruce closed his eyes he could almost feel Dick’s presence by his side, so acutely he could reach out for where he knew Dick’s shoulder would’ve been; but his hands would cup around only empty air. His hands would cup around that vacant space, and the grief would crush him.

 

Resolutely, Bruce stood, stretching a lump of tied muscle in his shoulder.

 

“Any preferences on breakfast, sir?” Alfred asked.

 

“Pancakes. Dick would want pancakes.”

 

“I’m glad you’re thinking of me,” Dick said, and Bruce’s breath caught. Dick hopped down the last few stairs, naturally posing with his chest forward, brandishing the Robin symbol as a bird brandished its crest. “I might have broken a couple speeding laws to get here before you left, by the way. At least you can’t ground me, right?”

 

Bruce swallowed back the joy that cut through him. “Dick? I thought you… were gone. With—people.”

 

Dick shrugged, twirling his domino on one finger. “College is full of people. None of ‘em are Batman. What d’you say, victory tour?”

 

“Of course,” Bruce said, immediately.

 

Alfred smiled. “Pancakes it is, sirs. Try not to get into too much trouble, please, if I have to go through the effort of breakfast.”

Dick jerked a thumb at Bruce with one hand, and with the other patted Alfred’s shoulder. “I’ll watch over the old guy here, don’t worry.”

 

“Hnh. Better watch your tone, kid.”

 

Alfred retreated up the stairs. For a moment, there was silence, only two partners appraising each other in the light of their home one last time; a father and his grown son. At eighteen, Dick was lean, of average height, with curly hair that rolled down over his ears and had started to brush his shoulders where he’d been growing it out. His skin was brown, but lighter than it’d been when he was a kid, and his teeth were no longer puckered with gaps or crooked at all. In fact, Dick had grown rather handsome, tall and confident and sure and none of the things Bruce had been at his age. He sparkled with life.

 

Bruce closed his eyes. His boy had gone and grown up, and in doing so had become a better fighter, a better friend, and a better man than Bruce had ever been.

 

“I want you to know I _am_ proud of you,” Bruce said, softly. “I don’t think… there are good enough words for it. I just know that seeing you grow has made me the luckiest man alive. I don’t say it enough. But I know it’s true.”

 

Dick ducked his head. “Yeah, well,” he mumbled, lamely. He flushed to the tips of his ears. “Gee, Bruce, I don’t even know what to say to that.”

 

A corner of Bruce’s lip jerked. “And you’re supposed to be the chatty one.”

 

“I know, right? I mean, look at you,” Dick said, gesturing with his hands. “Full sentences, feelings and everything! I think I might’ve rubbed off on you.”

“Hmph.”

 

“Oh, no, no, no, no grunt relapses,” Dick said, shaking a finger. “Not now. We’ve made such progress.”

 

Bruce turned, cape dusting the ground as he walked. His movements were sharp and nervous. “I have a present,” he said, unceremoniously. “Do you want it now, or after patrol.”

 

“That’s the world’s dumbest question, Mr. World’s Greatest Detective.”

 

Bruce huffed, and pulled a blue-wrapped box from between the black filing cabinet and the Batcomputer’s humming monitor. He handed it to Dick, who snatched it and started tearing into it with childish excitement. Sometimes, he feared for Dick; for all Dick had grown into a powerful and skilled young man, he was still such a _boy._ Somehow a sweetness, an innocence, a great field of kindness had survived his parents’ deaths. A preciousness the world could, and would, break between its teeth. Bruce couldn’t protect him forever; it was hard to hold on to a bird that was born to fly.

 

But Bruce trusted him, and loved him. He could not have loved a son more than he loved this one, so he’d let Robin fly.

 

“Oh, Bruce,” Dick whispered. His hand ghosted along the glass. “You built this?”

 

Bruce shifted. Then he shifted again, finding it hard to be comfortable under a voice that promised that much scrutiny. “Yes,” he said. “It’s an alarm clock. So you actually get up on time.”

 

Dick looked over at him, brow raised. “Oh, har har. You’re in no position to judge, I didn’t see you last Sunday ‘til two in the morning. But, it’s… God, it’s gorgeous. I don’t even want to know how long it took. Thank you, Bruce. Really.”

Dick lifted the clock out of the box, delicately, as if he were holding a diamond. It was a silver clock, gleaming in the light, carved on the outside to mimic the shape and growth of wood; on the top arc, three robins sat together, with copper for the feathers on the breasts. The middle one, the juvenile with the flecked feathers, held a flower in its beak. That flower had been carved and re-carved twenty-seven times.

 

“It doesn’t have an alarm,” Bruce said. “It sings, instead. Birdsong.”

Dick scrubbed at his eyes. “Of course. I mean, of course it does, you’re _you._ Thank you. I’ll keep it forever. And I’ll probably get to class on time, who knows.”

 

They were silent for a long moment, quiet in the face of the great change that stood before them. Eventually, Bruce said, “Victory tour?”

Dick grinned back. “I was thinking more of a… victory _race,_ Batman.”

 

“Hm. Maybe college will do you some good. Apparently you still think you can beat me.”

 

“Oh, it’s _on.”_

 

Batman and Robin flew across Gotham City, and it was far from the last time; the wheel kept turning.

 

(But Robin still won.)

**Author's Note:**

> I bet you thought I was joking about the flowers and the babies. Got you, motherfucker. I got you _so good._
> 
> So, the sorta-kinda plan for this universe is that it'll be mostly chapter fics, and, trust me, I've learned from my longfic mistakes, none of those will get posted until they're Totally Done. I know how I basically want a lot of the big shit to go down, though, because planning is my favorite thing to do in the history of ever. But sometimes you'll get shit like this, which is me sobbing into my keyboard and slapping it with a fish and calling it fanfiction.
> 
> As usual, drop questions, comments, and/or love letters below, or in my inbox at jerseydevious.tumblr.com! No, I don't know how to put links in AO3 notes! Will I ever learn? Probably not. I'm pretty permanently on my bullshit.


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